Police have cleared apologised to Rakest Naidoo over his Labour list announcement, though the police minister remains concerned and the commissioner won’t comment, writes Henry Oliver in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.
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A police review has cleared Labour’s top new list candidate, superintendent Rakesh Naidoo, of any breach of policy or confidentiality, as reported yesterday by The Post’s Henry Cooke. Assistant commissioner Tim Anderson said police were satisfied Naidoo’s correspondence with Labour, sent from his police email, related solely to his official duties, though Anderson noted it would have been “prudent” for Naidoo to have flagged his political conversations with police earlier than he did. “He apologised for the confusion over the timeline,” Cooke reported, “and admitted this had led to media being given incorrect information.”
The finding is awkward for police commissioner Richard Chambers and police minister Mark Mitchell, who were both publicly critical of Naidoo when his candidacy was announced in June, with Chambers (who has refused to comment on the finding) calling Naidoo’s continued position at the police “untenable.”
The Herald’s Adam Pearse noted the review’s scope also appeared to have narrowed over time – police initially said it would cover any information Naidoo may have shared with third parties generally, but Thursday’s findings addressed only his correspondence with Labour specifically, a shift police wouldn’t explain.
The timeline doesn’t match what was said publicly
The clearance came a day after an Official Information Act response (released during the National’s emergency caucus meeting) revealed Naidoo had actually told his supervisor about his potential candidacy roughly two weeks before it was announced – considerably earlier than Chambers and Mitchell’s public framing had implied, as reported by RNZ’s Sam Sherwood.
Anderson, Naidoo’s direct supervisor, said he’d chosen to treat the initial conversation as confidential at the time, since Naidoo hadn’t yet decided whether to stand, and hadn’t passed the information up to Chambers. Anderson apologised for that decision, acknowledging it had left the commissioner working from incomplete information and resulted in incorrect timeline details being given to the media.
Mitchell says his concerns went beyond the timeline
Even with Naidoo cleared, Mitchell made clear his unease hadn’t fully dissipated, as separately reported by RNZ’s Sam Sherwood. Mitchell confirmed he’d had two phone calls with Chambers in early June about a sensitive briefing Naidoo had attended with him just before Naidoo told anyone at police about his political intentions – concerns Mitchell said predated the disclosure timeline dispute entirely.
He declined to detail the substance of that briefing, citing the OIA’s provision protecting the maintenance of law. Speaking to reporters, Mitchell said a two-week notice period still fell short of what he considered acceptable given Naidoo’s seniority and access to sensitive material, saying safeguards should have been in place well before that to protect both the public and himself.
The apology and the aftertaste
Anderson’s apology, reported by The Post, marked the conclusion of a public saga that began in June, when Naidoo (then police’s national partnerships manager for ethnic, iwi, and communities) was placed at 13 on Labour’s party list.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins welcomed the clearance, saying it vindicated his position that Naidoo had acted appropriately and in good faith throughout, and pointing to the party’s own account of a gradual, months-long conversation with Naidoo before his candidacy was finalised.
For police, though, the whole affair leaves a bit of a bad aftertaste. The commissioner and minister were publicly outspoken in their criticism, the review’s scope seemed to shrink between announcement and outcome, the OIA response landed right in the middle of the election’s biggest news story so far, and the apology only surfaced after months of people asking who knew what, and when.
